Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ~ Mary Oliver

Weekly Walk 12

We took our walk a day early this week to beat the rain (and the mud), which means we just missed hiking on the shortest day of the year. Really, though, the day before the Solstice is pretty darned close.

My spouse is off work this week, so he joined us on our hike. This apparently signaled to our son that it was time to be a daredevil. He was climbing on everything. And of course he chose this week to hike in his cowboy boots.

Thank goodness he didn’t fall in the creek or the river or off the log (which was much higher in the middle than this photo shows, but I was too nervous to take a photo of him walking the higher part).

Besides my spouse’s presence, another difference this week was ice (again). We had thin, normal ice on the river.

And then we found this odd toothbrush ice, as my children dubbed it, in the mud along the trail:

It certainly felt cold enough for ice today, but based on the thermometer reading (low 40s Fahrenheit), we weren’t sure we’d see any.

Some other things we saw along the way:

Cool swirls in the creek.

Barberry.

The sun reflected in the pond.

Mud from my hiking boot, which my son found so intriguing, he asked me to photograph it before he broke it apart.

I’m not sure when we’re going to hike next week. My spouse is still off work, and we’ve got a kind of busy schedule. I’m sure we’ll find sometime to squeeze it in between social engagements, eating lots of food, and watching some new movie from JJ Abrams. (Well, and having some potentially major plumbing work done on our house, but I’m not going to think about that until I have to.)

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